Workers Probe Refinery, Seek 4 Missing After Blast

NORCO, La. — Workers wearing protective clothing and carrying oxygen tanks inched their way through hot, twisted metal Friday looking for four men missing since an oil refinery explosion killed three people and injured 42.

“The area is very much in disarray,” plant manager Fred Foster said. “There are large pieces of equipment off of foundations and down around the cat cracker. We’re inching along. As time goes on, it’s going to slow down.”

The catalytic cracking unit, used to break crude oil down into usable products such as gasoline, was at the center of the blast early Thursday at the Shell Oil Co. refinery.

Foster said the air was still heavy with fumes and small fires continued to burn.

Site Hard to Recognize

Dean Perniciaro, president of the Oil Workers union local at the plant, said Friday that he got a look at the blast area and could barely recognize the site.

“There was an impact to virtually every building in the facility. The area around the cat cracker is really tore up,” he said.

Shell spokesman Bill Gibson said Friday: “The plant manager visited the families (of the missing) last night. Afterward, he said there wasn’t much hope, but we’re still hopeful, of course.”

The bodies of Joey Poierrer, 28, of Reserve, and Ernie Carrillo, 44, of Kenner, were found Friday in the control room for the gasoline-processing unit. The body of 20-year Shell employee Lloyd Gregoire, 39, of Paulina, was found shortly after the explosion.

Agencies Join Investigation

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency sent investigators to the plant Friday to help in the search for the cause of the explosion.

Chemical engineers said they could find no record of an explosion by a catalytic cracker. “There is no historical trend for this event,” said Norman Marsolan, professor of chemical engineering at Louisiana Tech University.

Houston Huckabay, chairman of Tech’s chemical engineering department, said he checked a list of 100 refinery fires dating back to 1955 and found none of them involved a catalytic cracker.

The 25-year-old, 16-story catalytic cracking unit produced 336,000 gallons of gasoline a day.

No Estimate of Damage

Shell officials refused to speculate on how long the plant might be idle, although Shell’s adjacent chemical plant was expected to resume operations quickly. The officials would not estimate the cost of the damage.

It could take as little as 18 months or as long as 27 months to build a new one at a cost as high as $100 million, said Joseph Vasilj, chief estimator at a Long Beach, Calif., company that builds catalytic crackers.